When escaping to freedom on the Underground Railway, slaves would avoid the roads and their armed white militia patrols — the original “Second Amendment People” — and wade in streams, rivers and lakes to break the trail of their scent that the slave catchers’ dogs would follow. We don’t know who wrote this traditional song, but it was to educate the resistance of that time.
What will be the music of this
coming resistance period?
In a way, it was a trap that Democrats walked right into, notwithstanding history’s warnings.
Didn’t Richard Nixon, the former carnival barker and ultimate corporate politician, get elected to the US Senate by calling actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, a proud union member, an elitist?
Now Donald Trump, against the opposition of an overwhelming majority of American writers, composers and performing artists, has portrayed Kamala Harris as the candidate of the elites. A guy whose own accomplishments are largely matters of fiction, whose fortune derives from his grandfather the pimp, whose best-paying job was in that excretion of television culture, a “reality TV” show in which he fired people, portrayed the most creative people on the US cultural scene as “elitists” and tens of millions of voters bought that.
Yes, there were all these entertainers who sang, played and shared the stage at Kamala rallies but as it turned out the best cultural response to Trump from the blue side came from a South African.
It’s as if Democrats had fully bought into the neoliberal culture of celebrity, that actors and musicians, rather than skilled working people with their own intellects and things to say, are these market commodities whose value can be expressed in dollars and cents. That in a campaign season that partly coincided with a Screen Actors Guild strike. That’s behind us now, and the USA and the world are going into a new political and cultural period. Back then, beatniks and jazz were at the forefront of the popular cultural resistance to the McCarthy era of the 50s. The hippies and the black militants, and their cultural expressions, were the better part of the events leading to the night they drove Dick Nixon down.
A new period is coming, most probably not to a tune bought or stolen from an entertainment corporation. The new resistance needs its own, popular songs and symbols.
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